The Review

Sometimes provenance (or packaging) brings latecomers to this game, and now, with 3 weeks of ‘autumn’ left in 2015 (I know that most people aren’t keeping track via that metric), we time-travel back a couple months or so.

This 500ml can pours a clear, medium bronzed amber colour, with three fingers of puffy, finely foamy, and mildly bubbly ecru head, which leaves some snowy mountaintop profile lace around the glass as it slowly sinks away.

It smells of semi-sweet, bready caramel malt, a faint biscuity graininess, white and red grape juice, and tame leafy, earthy, and grassy noble hops. The taste is grainy, doughy caramel malt, lightly buttered sweet biscuits, a muddled pale orchard fruitiness (apples and green grapes, mostly), ethereal hints of gasohol, and a plain leafy, weedy, and dead grassy hoppiness. The carbonation is quite light and spritely in its genial frothiness, the body an adequate middleweight, and more or less smooth, with a small airy creaminess arising as things warm up a tad. It finishes well off-dry, as the lingering malt and fruity essences wouldn’t, couldn’t have it any other way.

A typical (and I mean that in a complimentary way) version of the style, i.e. lots of robust sweetness, barely tempered by a generally sedate hop offset, all of which duly mask the increase in ABV – not a big deal for this serving, I know, but I hear that they sometimes drink vast multiples of this stuff sometime around the beginning of October.